Cyril Ramaphosa must personally apologise: Marikana widows

A personal apology from President Cyril Ramaphosa is one of the key demands being made by the widows of the mineworkers killed during the Marikana massacre.

Thursday marks six years since 34 striking mineworkers were shot and killed at the Lonmin mine in Rustenburg, North West, during an unprotected strike.

Ramaphosa, who was a former Lonmin board member in 2012 and a key witness at the Farlam Commission of Inquiry, is currently not in South Africa. He will not be visiting Marikana as he is set to attend a SADC meeting in Namibia.

He infamously wrote a string of emails the week before the Marikana shootings which shows how he used his political connection to call for stronger police action against the striking miners which were harming Lonmin’s profits.

Ramaphosa was cleared of wrongdoing by the Farlam Commission of Inquiry.

In July, at the funeral of struggle stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the president promised to visit Marikana once compensation processes have been concluded.

Lawyer Zamantungwa Khumalo, who’s representing families of the slain miners, says while one offer for the loss of income has been accepted by the relatives, two other claims for constitutional and general damages, as well as an apology from Ramaphosa are still outstanding.

“Every day all of those families have to be reminded about what happened [in 2012],” Khumalo says.

In 2010, Ramaphosa was appointed as head of Lonmin’s transformation committee as part of his duties as non-executive director.

It is also the same year that Ramaphosa’s company, Shanduka, had acquired a 9% stake in Lonmin as part of the latter’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) targets.

Shanduka was paid a R250 000 a month to advise Lonmin about transformation.

During the Farlam Commission hearings in 2014, Legal Resources Centre’s advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who represented the family of a mineworker who was among those killed on 16 August, argued that Lonmin had promised to build 5500 new homes for miners, but only managed to build three.

“It is so clear that if you look at what was said in 2011 about what the responsibilities of mining companies were, this was a complete failure on the part of Lonmin,” he told the court.

The commission of inquiry found that the lack of housing in the shanty towns dotting Marikana were a key reason for the unprotected strike in 2012.

Other inconsistencies arose in Ramaphosa’s testimony before the commission where he contradicted the then mineral resources minister Susan Shabangu about whether he’d called her to try intervene in the strike.

“He’s the one [Ramaphosa] that was under pressure so he had to find a way of making sure that his colleagues feel that he was doing his work.”

Meanwhile, Ramaphosa’s political career since 2012 has taken off, first elected as deputy president of the ANC later in that year, and president of the party in December 2017.

He’s since been praised for his promises to grow the South African economy and reposition the country on the world stage.

However, in a small almost forgotten part of the North West mining town, Ramaphosa is seen as the man behind the bloodbath.